Susan Orlean makes her third trip back to the podcast (Ep. 61 and 121), this time to celebrate her latest book, a collection of her magazine work on animals titled … On Animals.
She’s the best selling author The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, and The Orchid Thief. She’s been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1990s and, as many of you know, seeing a Susan Orlean byline is something like appointment reading. It’s special.
Laura Todd Carns is here to talk about her latest feature for The Atavist Magazine. It’s called “Searching for Mr. X: For eight years, a man without a memory lived among strangers at a hospital in Mississippi. But was recovering his identity the happy ending he was looking for?”
Laura is a novelist, essayist, and journalist whose work has appeared in many places. You can find out more at her website.
In this episode we talk about approaching a story as fiction vs. nonfiction, the challenge of the structure of the piece, collaborating with an editor and how it’s like a record producer and a musician, and more.
First I talk to Seyward Darby, as she was the lead editor of the piece. Enjoy!
Had a great chat about day jobs and threading the work you want to do around that, how there’s no “writer’s life,” but rather just a “writer living.” That’s a direct quote from her Hippocamp talk this year.
Her essay collection delves into her identity as a Black woman, divorce, relationships, sex, the masks we where, and so on. Highly recommend.
Jess Phoenix. What else is there to say? She’s the author of Ms. Adventure: My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava, and Life (Timber Press, 2021). She’s a volcanologist and geologist (that might be like saying a square is also a rectangle, but we’ll leave it at that, mmkay?). She’s the founder of Blueprint Earth. She has studied English, history, geology, and earned an MFA in creative nonfiction. She also ran for Congress in 2018. She co-owns a horse farm where she rescues retired thoroughbreds from potential slaughter and re-trains them to be jumpers.
How’s your life going?
Oh, and she delivered a pretty baller TEDx talk.
You might wonder why someone like her would talk to a scrub like me. And you’d be correct to wonder, but here we are!
What is so great about this book is you can be a seasoned, skilled writer/editor and this book will level you up. The book is a gift, and so too is Allison.
She’s the 2021 Literary Citizen of the Year for Hippocamp. She’s also the social media editor (?) for Brevity Magazine, and many of her craft essays for Brevity are adapted in Seven Drafts. Dig it.
In any case, we dig into lots of stuff about editing, story holes, retyping entire manuscripts, and what it means to cultivate a “writer’s life.”
Consider supporting the podcast and the audio magazine by heading to Patreon.com/cnfpod. There, you can earn transcripts, coaching, editing, and get exclusive access to the audio magazine.
First I speak with editor-in-chief Seyward Darby and then let Nile take it from there.
With Nile, we talk about the writing lessons she’s gleaned from bouldering, how she got into true crime as a kind of self-preservation, and how she determines what stories are “worthy.” We also dig into how she got her foot in the door to full time freelancing.
Please enjoy, and consider supporting the show in myriad ways, be that subscribing, leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts, or even plunking down a few bucks at patreon.com/cnfpod.
As you know, you can keep the conversation going on Twitter @BrendanOMeara or @CNFPod. Let me know what you dug about this episode, or other ones.
And if you’re feeling especially froggy, you can support the show by heading over to patreon.com/cnfpod and see what tier appeals to you. Transcripts, questions, coaching, and the knowledge that your dollars get fed right back into the community. I was able to pay the essay and poem writers because of the Patreon community. That’s cool, right?
Newsletters sub is below. You’re gonna want to sign up for that and subvert the algorithm. I’ve got some cool stuff planned that will be like the CNFin’ Happy Hour, but somehow better, and it all stems from the newsletter. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it!
What an experience Hippocamp was this year. Donna Talarico stuck the landing in pandemic times. The degree of difficulty is Simone Biles-esque!
I don’t I’ve worked as hard on any one thing like I did on this Hippocamp talk in a long, long while. I put everything I had into it. That said, I had a very hard time gauging what the audience thought of it. It was a pretty sparse turnout, so far as Hippocamp talks go. Everyone was masked, so I couldn’t tell if people were smiling or dying inside. There were only two questions, whereas most breakout sessions of this nature have several questions.
Naturally I felt like a comic who bombed.
Still, some people came up to me and said they loved it. Not meaning to undercut their good will, I was like, “Really? Cuz it felt dead to me up there and there were no questions …”
They usually said the talk itself didn’t lend itself to questions. It leant itself to thought. In any case, I still gave it my all to the gracious folks who showed up.
I tell you, it was a privilege to put this together. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, consider becoming a Patron at patreon.com/cnfpod, as I think I’ll start doing similar things like this (much, much shorter) as Patreon exclusives.
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